J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 1123

Balkinization: Halbig, King, and the Limits of Reasonable Legal Disagreement

Neil Siegel: Halbig, King, and the Limits of Reasonable Legal Disagreement: In the debates over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act...

...I did not dismiss the arguments of those who disagreed with me. There often has been reasonable, irreconcilable disagreement over the meaning of the Constitution.... Halbig and King... are different. I can accept... that the relevant provisions of the ACA are ambiguous. What I cannot accept as reasonable or responsible... is the argument... that the ACA Congress clearly and unambiguously accomplished what no Member of Congress, no one in the Congressional Budget Office, none of the four dissenting Justices in NFIB v. Sebelius, and no state official realized that Congress had accomplished when it passed the ACA: self-destructively limit the tax subsidies that make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans to those who have the good fortune of happening to reside in states that set up their own health insurance exchanges....

Some may conclude that I am not as tolerant of reasonable legal disagreement as I think I am or used to be. Others may conclude that I care too much about the draconian financial consequences for millions of Americans and insurance companies if this litigation succeeds. I have considered these possibilities, and I have rejected them. The plaintiffs’ case is so weak and transparently political that it is dismaying to see it be taken seriously.

Aaron Swartz Day: Live from the Internet Archive

Aaron Swartz Day:

The Internet Archive is hosting an Aaron Swartz Day Celebration on what would have been Aaron’s 28th birthday: November 8, 2014, from 6-10:30 pm. Although we are looking ahead, rather than dwelling on the past, this year’s theme is ‘Setting the record straight.’ Now that we have brought people together and shared information with each other, the smoke has cleared a bit, and we can clearly explain to the world exactly what Aaron actually did and did not do.

ocation: 300 Funston Ave, San Francisco, CA 94118

Reception: 6pm-7pm – Come mingle with the speakers and celebrate Aaron’s accomplishments.

Speakers: 7pm-8pm – The Year in Aaron 2014: A comprehensive update.

Movie: 8-9:45 pm – Watch The Internet’s Own Boy with Director Brian Knappenberger.

Q & A: 9:45 pm -  Audience Q & A with Brian Knappenberger and Trevor Timm (co-founder and Executive Director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation) and John Perry Barlow (EFF and Freedom of the Press Foundation co-founder) after the movie!

Speakers:

April Glaser (EFF, Freedom to Innovate Summit). The Freedom to Innovate Summit is a collaboration between EFF and the Center for Civic Media at MIT that calls upon Universities to protect students who innovate at the boundaries of the law.

Yan Zhu (Yahoo, SF Hackathon Organizer). Yan will explain the history, and evolution to the present day, of the Aaron Swartz International Hackathon.

Brewster Kahle (Digital Librarian, Internet Archive). Internet Archive has just launched a new set of tools for building collaborative libraries online that were inspired by Aaron’s dreams and visions.

Cindy Cohn (EFF Legal Director – CFAA Reform). A short and simple update on a very complicated subject: Why most attempts to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act have largely stalled in Congress.

Kevin Poulsen (Journalist – FOIA case that MIT intervened in). An update on the most recent batch of documents and video from Aaron’s FBI and Secret Service files that have finally trickled out of the U.S. government over this last year, after undergoing further redactions by MIT.

Garrett Robinson and James Dolan (SecureDrop). 2014 was a big year for Aaron’s whistleblowing submission platform, with 15 new instances including:  Forbes, Greenpeace New Zealand, The Guardian, The Intercept, The New Yorker, BayLeaks, and The Washington Post.

Daniel Purcell (Keker & Van Nest, one of Aaron’s lawyers). Along with Eiliot Peters, Dan Purcell was hired by Aaron and his family in September 2012 to defend Aaron at his criminal trial, set for March 2013. Dan will talk about Aaron’s defenses to the criminal charges and the expert testimony the legal team planned to present.

The event will take place following this year’s San Francisco-based Aaron Swartz International Hackathon, which is going on Saturday and Sunday from 11am-6pm at the Internet Archive http://aaronswartzhackathon.org

Confirmed 2014 cities include: Berlin, Boston, Buenos Aires, Houston, Kathmandu, Los Angeles, Magdeberg, Mexico City, New York, Oxford, San Francisco and Sau Paulo.

Weekend Reading: Sarah Varney: How Obamacare Went South In Mississippi

Sarah Varney: How Obamacare Went South In Mississippi: "Mississippians are all too familiar with the dirge of bleak statistics...

...During my travels, I often heard, ‘We know what the rest of the country thinks of us.’ It would become a point of pride, then, that in 2007, Mississippi was leading a race it wanted to win. That fall, a full year before Obama’s election to the White House put national health care reform on the agenda, the governor, Haley Barbour, called up the newly elected state insurance commissioner Mike Chaney, a Vietnam veteran from Vicksburg. The two Republicans had been friends since college; Chaney had been the rush chairman for Sigma Alpha Epsilon at Mississippi State University when Barbour pledged the fraternity. Now, the governor had an assignment for his old friend.

‘He said, ‘Chaney, I want you to get involved in something that the Heritage Foundation had talked about,’’ Chaney, 70, recalled when I spoke to him at his Jackson office in June. Barbour, a folksy titan who had returned to rule over Mississippi politics after a successful career as a Washington super lobbyist and national Republican Party chairman, had enraged advocates for the poor with a series of stringent new restrictions on Medicaid. Now he was keen to take up the conservative think tank’s ideas to aid one portion of those without health insurance: ‘The largest group of the uninsured in Mississippi when I was governor were the employees of small businesses,’ Barbour told me. He tasked Chaney with laying out how Mississippi could set up an online marketplace where the state’s many small businesses could pool their purchasing power to shop for medical coverage.

The idea, at the time, was seen as a conservative one. It was part of the health reform law Republican Gov. Mitt Romney had signed in Massachusetts in 2006, and Barbour was touting it as an economic development measure. ‘I went from not liking it, to really falling in love with it,’ Chaney told me. ‘You know, like you didn’t like the girl in the third grade and you ended up marrying her?’

By 2010, when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, planning was well underway for a state-based exchange in Mississippi. ‘We had no elected officials who were against what we were doing,’ Chaney insists today.

As Chaney pushed ahead—hiring technology vendors, convening committees and holding town hall meetings—he expected minimal interference. In December 2010, more than 100 elected officials, agency heads, business leaders and health insurers had attended a ‘Stakeholders Summit.’ Six months later, Barbour wrote a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s secretary of Health and Human Services, designating Chaney and the Mississippi Insurance Department as the ‘proper authority’ to apply for federal ACA funding to build the exchange. Barbour, a pragmatic dealmaker, made clear his interest came ‘before President Obama took office and much earlier than Obamacare was enacted,’ and that his plan would meet ‘the needs of Mississippi, not what is right for Washington.’

Chaney moved ahead swiftly. Over the summer of 2011, with $21 million in federal grants, he hired the firm Getinsured.com to build the state’s site—christened ‘OneMississippi.com’—and held weekly meetings with his team, whom he had instructed to read Landmark, the Washington Post’s guide to the health law. (‘We bought 20 copies,’ Chaney told me, holding the book up in his office. ‘It’s a great read.’) Blue Cross Blue Shield, which had more than 80 percent of the insurance market in Mississippi, assured Chaney it was in. The Center for Mississippi Health Policy, a non-partisan research group, estimated that 1 in 10 nonelderly residents would be eligible to buy coverage through the exchange and that 230,000 low-income Mississippians would be able to receive federal tax credits, totaling $900 million a year, to help them purchase insurance on the exchange.

At the end of that summer, OneMississippi.com billboards went up across the state at football stadiums—the town squares of Mississippi. ‘Your One Stop Health Choice,’ the ads read, next to a picture of Chaney’s smiling face. Chaney anticipated federal regulators would approve the site by the end of the year. The website was ready. Mississippi would get something right for a change.

INSURRECTION

While Chaney waited for federal approval, however, the crowd’s mood began to sour.

The Affordable Care Act had descended on Mississippi like so many prior federal edicts: as an invasion from the North that fractured along racial lines, stoking grievances that still lingered since the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era. This latest incursion — the health law — gave rise to a vicious rebellion among conservative whites in a state that arguably had the most to gain. In June 2012, after the Supreme Court upheld the law’s core principle — requiring most Americans obtain health coverage or pay a penalty — Mississippi Tea Party co-founder Roy Nicholson issued a florid order to the ground troops: ‘To resist by all means that are right in the eyes of God is not rebellion or insurrection. It is patriotic resistance to invasion.’

The Tea party’s call to cut federal taxes resonated with Mississippians who have the lowest per capita income — at $33,073 — in the nation. ‘You’re talking about folks who get up at four in the morning and go to work hauling logs or work in a machine shop and come home at night at 6 pm, and their understanding of government is that gap between net pay and gross pay. As far as why [the government] took it, that doesn’t compute,’ Marty Wiseman, a political science professor emeritus at Mississippi State University, told me. Summing up the sentiments broadcast on Mississippi talk radio, Wiseman, a Democrat who is white added, ‘Then you throw in that ‘Muslim’ black president up there, and it’s like throwing a match on gasoline.’

And yet, as much as Mississippi conservatives abhor the federal government, American taxpayers spend dearly to keep the state solvent. Mississippi receives about $3 for every $1 it sends northward to Washington; nearly half of the state’s annual budget depends on federal disbursements. ‘If you cut that out,’ Wiseman said, ‘we would cease to be a going concern.’

A garrulous giant of a man who prefers suspenders and bow ties, Wiseman, 63, is pained by his state’s seemingly pathological hatred of Washington.  ‘It’s still hard to explain the old embrace of the lost cause of the Civil War where we came home ragtag, and ‘By golly the South shall ride again,’’ he said of white Mississippians. ‘There’s a certain resentment that I’d rather live in my double-wide in the country and find a way to make it.’

Whites continue to dominate Mississippi’s elected elite, despite the fact that Mississippi is home to a higher percentage of African Americans — 37 percent — than any other state. Black residents are spread out among the state’s four congressional districts, diluting their political power, and three of the four House members who represent Mississippi are white Republicans. Democrats lost their last vestige of control in 2012 when tea party-backed candidates helped Republicans gain control of both houses of the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction.

After Barbour’s term ended in January 2012, the tea party’s roots reached the governor’s mansion. Phil Bryant, the son of a diesel mechanic who was raised in the Delta, had served as Barbour’s lieutenant governor, but his politics skewed harder right. When he was elected, the state tea party jubilantly declared him the nation’s first tea party governor, a label he embraced. Conservative activists admired Bryant’s uncompromising opposition to illegal immigration, his vows of austerity and his law enforcement credentials — he had been a jailer and deputy sheriff earlier in his career. That he loathed the Affordable Care Act was a given.

Soon after Bryant was sworn in, the Obamacare fuse was lit by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a member of a national network of think tanks that reportedly receives funding from the billionaire Koch brothers. As Mississippi’s plan for a state exchange garnered national press and became something of an embarrassment for the conservative faithful, the think tank’s president, Forest Thigpen, seized the moment to come out against it. The insurrection urged by tea party founder Nicholson was on, and those seen as helping to put the law into place were now considered traitors.

Chaney didn’t see the ambush coming.

On the morning of July 12, 2012, just weeks after the Supreme Court had upheld the Affordable Care Act’s contentious individual mandate, Chaney was flying to Tupelo in a state plane during a driving rainstorm when his phone rang. It was Thigpen, who was hosting a luncheon in Jackson later that day with the Cato Institute, the libertarian Washington think tank, for some 200 guests, including Chaney. ‘He said, ‘I want to know if you want to make some comments,’’ Chaney recalls. ‘And I said, ‘Forest, why would I make comments? This is your meeting.’… I said, ‘Let me call you back. We’re trying to land here, and we can’t see the runway.’’ The pilot missed the touch down.

When Chaney returned to Jackson later that morning, the governor phoned Chaney to say he wouldn’t be there. ‘I should have known at that point that I had a problem,’ Chaney says.

Chaney and his aide were the last two people into the ballroom, and Chaney remembers that the doors locked behind them. Bill Stone, chairman of the Thigpen’s board, led the ballroom in a prayer, ‘Lord, I thank you for today’s free exchange of ideas,’ he said somberly, if not prophetically, according to a video of the event posted on YouTube. ‘We ask these things in Christ’s name.’

As forks and knives clinked against plates, in front of hundreds of attendees, Michael Cannon, Cato Institute’s health policy director, took to the podium. He insisted Mississippi abandon its exchange. The federal government ‘is desperate for Mississippi to do its dirty work,’ Cannon told the audience, and ‘will do anything they can to bribe states to create them.’ He then asked the elected officials in the room to raise their hands: ‘If you took an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and you believe this law is unconstitutional,’ Cannon said, ‘then, I submit you have a duty to prevent this law from ever taking full effect.’ The room erupted in applause.

‘And at that point, they called me out,’ Chaney recalled. Boos rumbled through the banquet hall. Caught off-guard, Chaney stood up. ‘I want to make it clear to you,’ Chaney told the audience, fuming. ‘I’m a Republican. I support Romney. If you don’t like the exchange, vote in November and replace the man in the White House, and we’ll all be happy.’ Sensing the obvious truth of it all, he sat down.

In his office this summer Chaney lingered over the memory. ‘They set me up,’ he said.

Gentlemanly political customs were giving way to something more brusque. Mike Chaney—the former rush chairman at Mississippi State, friend of the powerful Haley Barbour—had been pushed out.

THE AMBUSH

Shortly after the disastrous Cato luncheon, Bryant called and asked Chaney to delay the plans for the exchange.

‘I said, ‘Phil, I can’t do that,’’ Chaney recalled. He told the governor the state was contractually obligated to its vendors. The pressure continued. In August, one of the governor’s attorneys asked Chaney to withdraw the plan’s blueprint from federal consideration. That same month, a confidant of Chaney’s who sat on the state government’s Personnel Board called to say Bryant had requested the board delay approval of a $3.5 million, federally funded ACA outreach contract meant to make residents aware of their coverage options. It would never be authorized. In a letter to Chaney, Bryant acknowledged the board had blocked the contract. ‘I simply do not consider it a wise use of taxpayer dollars,’ he wrote.

As Barbour’s second in command, Bryant had publicly supported the then-governor’s push for a free-market exchange in Mississippi, but now Bryant wrote to Chaney, ‘I have never supported exchanges as they will operate under Obamacare,’ which ‘will not be market-based in any significant sense’ and would depend on ‘massive and unaffordable federal subsidies.’

Still, Chaney fought on, and in October 2012, a full year before the federal government’s website opened, his OneMississippi.com went live. The passageways to various federal databases had yet to be built and consumers could not yet qualify for subsidies, but health plans were on sale. The site still needed approval from The Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, the federal body that oversees the health care exchanges, before it could be an official ACA-sanctioned marketplace, and Chaney’s staff had been in weekly contact with CCIIO’s director, Gary Cohen, to make sure OneMississippi.com would eventually comply.

But after Obama’s reelection in November 2012 made clear his health law was headed toward implementation, Bryant decided to fight. Chaney wrote to CCIIO’s Cohen saying it was ‘our intent to implement and operate a state-based exchange for the citizens of Mississippi that is tailored to the unique needs of our state.’ He continued: ‘As an elected official and the chief officer of the Department of Insurance, I am authorized by state law to submit this Exchange Declaration Letter on behalf of the State of Mississippi.’ Bryant fired off his own letter to Sebelius, declaring that he was in ‘complete disagreement’ with Chaney. By this time, Chaney and Bryant’s relationship had deteriorated to the point that Chaney had to get a copy of the letter from federal regulators. ‘I am disappointed with the submission of that letter, and I am exploring my options,’ the governor wrote, adding that the health care exchange was a ‘gateway’ for a law he opposed.

As the pitched political drama escalated, the objections among Tea Party activists piled up. An Obamacare-sanctioned exchange, with its generous subsidies, ‘would just invite more and more people on welfare and public assistance to flock to our state,’ Laura VanOverschelde, chairwoman of the Mississippi Tea Party, told me. What’s more, she added, the types of plans for sale on the exchange ‘mimicked an old premise – that is health maintenance organizations in the 80s.’ Those plans ‘dismally failed,’ VanOverschelde said, ‘because people will simply not do what they need to, to take care of themselves. And Mississippi is a prime example.’

CCIIO remained quiet about Mississippi’s application all fall and into early winter. But by January, Chaney had lost his patience with Cohen. ‘I asked him point blank, ‘Damn it, Cohen, are you going to approve this or not?’’ Later that week, Cohen called to say that Sebelius was rejecting Mississippi’s exchange, citing Bryant’s lack of support. ‘As a practical matter, it wasn’t going to work,’ Cohen told me. Chaney’s exchange would have needed cooperation from the state Medicaid agency led by a Bryant appointee, and the governor could easily stymie funding and hiring decisions. ‘We’d didn’t feel that we should get involved in a battle between two elected state officials,’ Cohen said.

Mississippi, ever the collector of unenviable distinctions, became the only state to have its exchange application rejected by the federal government. On Valentine’s Day, after four months of operation, OneMississippi.com went dark.

THE FALL OUT

In the weeks following the shutdown of the state exchange, the community organizers, physicians, employers and insurance brokers who had been the architects of the plan fell into disarray. ‘It was infuriating to see the governor gut all that work,’ said Felicia Brown-Williams, director of public policy at Planned Parenthood in Jackson. ‘We were so far ahead of the curve.’ Many African Americans blamed Obama for the failure. ‘I’ve heard leaders in the community, black leaders, blame Obama. That he should have planned it better,’ Dr. Alice Graham, an ordained minister in Gulfport, told me.

The question now became: In an insular state led by a governor committed to thwarting Obamacare, who was eager to embark on a mission to lead sign ups in Mississippi? It was a short list with a delicate calculus: Those with something to lose didn’t want to make the governor look bad by making the ACA look good.

The University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, the state’s only academic medical center, raised its hand. Some 220 uninsured patients from around the state passed through the hospital’s doors every day making it the perfect place to catch potential customers. Financial counselors who already worked with the hospital’s uninsured patients would become certified as ‘navigators’ to enroll Obamacare shoppers, and the hospital would set up a satellite office at the Jackson Medical Mall, a former shopping center repurposed to offer health services to the poor. Still, the decision to apply for a federal navigator grant was politically sensitive; the hospital sought Gov. Bryant’s blessing before moving forward.

Community groups in Jackson—some of whom were now competing for the same federal grants—were wary of UMMC’s strategy; they doubted the hospital could man the ground war necessary to span the state’s rural landscape.

But when the grants to lead signups in Mississippi were announced in August 2013, UMMC trounced the other contenders. Of the $1.1 million awarded to Mississippi, UMMC nabbed the biggest share—$832,000. The only other recipient—Oak Hill Baptist Church, a tiny black congregation in the town of Hernando, near the Tennessee border—was something of a mystery to Mississippi’s tight-knit health advocacy network, but its pastor, Michael Minor, and his wife, had been lauded at the White House for the church’s health ministry.

Roy Mitchell, named to Chaney’s advisory board as the lead member with ‘experience in enrollment,’ had been passed over. Mitchell suspects the contracts went to the politically connected UMMC, the largest single recipient of Medicaid funds in Mississippi, and the charismatic pastor with ties to the White House. He feared neither would deliver. Even Commissioner Chaney weighed in, ‘Your navigator program is so horrible, you outta let me operate it for you,’ Chaney told Cohen. ‘They wouldn’t let us do it.’

To Michael Minor, the strategy made perfect sense. Mississippi consistently ranked as the most religious state in the country, and as part of the National Baptist Convention, which played a vital role in black Mississippi life, Minor—and the White House—viewed the churches as key to getting the word out about the much-maligned new law.

UMMC and Oak Hill had just six weeks before open enrollment began, on Oct. 1, to train and certify their navigators, open call centers and drop-in locations, print publicity materials, schedule public events and deploy their plans with little more than $1 million.

Finite money for advertising and outreach and local political hostilities meant federal administrators focused, by necessity, on their ‘return on investment,’ one longtime Republican health policy staffer in the Senate told me. ‘In states that decided, for political reasons, to oppose Obamacare, there was the sense, ‘So be it. Let ‘em go.’’

Meanwhile, Cover Mississippi, a coalition that had risen out of Chaney’s exchange wreckage, led by Roy Mitchell, was penniless. Enroll America, a nonprofit group that had formed to connect uninsured people with enrollment help, had decided not to send its vast door-knocking army of volunteers. It would concentrate instead on the more populous states of Florida and Texas. Public awareness was dismal; uninsured Mississippians were either indifferent or hostile...

It Really Is the Case That Medicaid Expansion Is the Low-Hanging Fruit for a State...

Medicare Part D Questions, and in Kansas City Today?--Now Storified!

Need to know about Medicare Part D & in Kansas City?

UMKC Phrm/Law School Medicare Part D Information Fair
Today, 8-1
Pierson Auditorium


MedicarePartD

[View the story "Medicare Part D Information Fair" on Storify]

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Liveblogging World War I: November 8, 1914: Worcester News

: Worcester Daily Diary, November 8, 1914:

LOCAL CASUALTIES: 4: Privates John Thomas Boyle & Alfred Day, Company Sergeant Major William Williams - Second Battalion. Private Samuel Marsland - Third Battalion. ROLLING CASUALTY COUNT: 475

Second Battalion relieved the Connaught Rangers in the trenches North East of Polygone Wood.  Shrapnel fire during the relief. Battalion placed under the orders of  the GOC Sixth Infantry Brigade.  Few casualties.

Third Battalion: Bois de Ploegsteert: In trenches. Sniping and shelling during day.  In evening Battalion relieved by Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders. In centre, East Lancs on right and Lancashire Fusiliers on left, and returned to billets North of Ploegsteert.

The Silver Cinema: ‘On the King’s Service’, The Thirteenth Series of Lucille Love.  War Films at every performance, twice nightly 6.50pm and 9pm.

The Secretary of the Worcestershire Territorial Association begs to acknowledge, with thanks, the following donations towards the  Auxiliary Forces Fund: Mr Edward Goulding, MP £5; ILR 10s; TS 2s.  This is the fund for which the Lord Lieutenant and the Chairman of the Territorial Association appealed recently for gifts, in money and kind, for comforts for the members of the Territorial Force, such as shirts, socks, mittens, comforters etc.

About 40 men accustomed to horses are urgently required for the Reserve unit,  Transport and Supply Column.  Mounted Brigade Recruits should apply at the Headquarters, Silver Street.

More Territorials Leave Worcester: At noon a party of 48 men, under Lieutenant Woodward, left Shrub Hill to join the main Battalion at their war station.  They were headed by the Eighth Battalion Band under Bandmaster W E Davies.  About 200 members of the Brigade accompanied the men to their station, en route to which the Band played the ‘Tipperary March,’ ‘Boys of the Old Brigade,’ and the Worcestershire Regimental March.  Large crowds gathered at the station to give the men a hearty send-off…Cheers were given for several officers, who passed from carriage to carriage giving hearty handshakes.  All the men were in the best of spirits, and cracked jokes and sang popular songs until the train was on the move, when the Band struck up ‘Auld Lang Syne.’  

Another batch of men from the Eighth Battalion will leave Worcester on Tuesday, and further drafts will be sent during the next few weeks from the Eighth Battalion and the Artillery and the Yeomanry to replace those units who are either medically unfit or who are marked ‘Home Service’ only.

Comforts for Worcestershires: There are many people who would like to send comforts to our troops at the front, who are undecided what to send and where to sent it.  An admirable movement has been started in Worcester for our Worcestershire soldiers, and up to now, the response has been splendid.  All gifts in money or kind, should be sent to the Army Comfort Store at the Capital and Countries’ Bank.  Twice a week, large quantities of comforts are sent up, and gifts sent through the Store are packed and addressed with scrupulous care.  All packages are addressed to the Companies.  Boxes for packing have been generously given by several Worcester firms, and not a package has yet miscarried.  Grateful little messages of thanks have been sent by the soldiers for the welcome presents.  The store is under the management of Mrs A V Wodehouse, wife of Major Wodehouse, of the First Worcestershires, and she is assisted by ….Mr Edward Goulding MP, who visited the store, was extremely impressed by its usefulness, and by the large amount of comforts sent.  He immediately gave £10 for the store.

Claines School: The annual concert took place on Wednesday.  There was a crowded audience.  The singing of the Allies’ National Anthems was particularly good, and the tableaux were most effective.  The proceeds this year are to be divided between the Worcestershire War  Relief Fund, the Belgian Refugees Fund in Worcester, and Princess Mary’s appeal for Christmas gifts for the soldiers.  It is hoped to clear £3.

Afternoon Must-Read: Nicholas Bagley: The Supreme Court Will Hear King. That’s Bad News for the ACA

Let me say that I disagree with the very sharp Nicholas Bagley: The decision of four Supreme Court justices to hear an appeal of King is not bad news for ObamaCare--it is bad news for Republican state-level politicians and for the people of nineteen states.

In the other 31 states, Obamacare is doing fine and is likely to keep doing fine in spite of whatever the Supreme Court rules in King. In those 31 states, they either have state exchanges that are unaffected by King or will quickly add a state wrapper to their federal exchange: no state politicians of any party are going to accept ObamaCare money to cover their Medicaid poor and deny exchange subsidies to their middle class.

But the politicians and Obamacare are now in much bigger trouble in the nineteen states with one-third of the population: Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, Wyoming. If King brings down the hammer, will the politicians of the nineteen nullification states throw away the $40 billion in exchange subsidies to their middle-class citizens that are currently anticipated for 2016? That seems a very heavy political lift.

And I very much doubt that the King appellants will be able to round up their fifth vote: the Supreme Court would have to overrule long lines of statutory interpretation and break a great deal of administrative law in pieces to get there.

They might: this is a very partisan Supreme Court that follows the election returns.

But I think Roberts wishes to have a place in history different from that of MacReynolds.

Nicholas Bagley: : The Supreme Court will hear King. That’s bad news for the ACA: "In a significant setback for the Obama administration...

the Supreme Court just agreed to review King v. Burwell, the Fourth Circuit’s decision upholding an IRS rule extending tax credits to federally established exchanges.... At least four justices... voted to take the case... The justices’ votes on whether to grant the case are decent proxies for how they’ll decide the case. The justices who agree with King wouldn’t vote to grant.... The justices who disagree with King... there are at least four such justices.... That means that either Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Kennedy will again hold the key vote. None of this bodes well for the government. That’s not to say the government can’t win. It might. As I’ve said many times, the statutory arguments cut in its favor. But the Court’s decision to grant King substantially increases the odds that the government will lose this case. The states that refused to set up their own exchange need to start thinking—-now—-about what to do if the Court releases a decision in June 2015 withdrawing tax credits from their citizens.

Lunchtime Must-Read: Ryan Avent: Forget the 1%. It's the Top 0.01% Who Are Really Getting Ahead in America

Ryan Avent: Forget the 1%: "It is the 0.01% who are really getting ahead in America...

...Saez and... Zucman... uses a richer variety of sources.... The share of wealth held by the bottom 90% is an effective measure of 'middle class' wealth.... In the late 1920s the bottom 90% held just 16% of America’s wealth—-considerably less than that held by the top 0.1%, which controlled a quarter of total wealth just before the crash of 1929.... By the early 1980s the share of household wealth held by the middle class rose to 36%—roughly four times the share controlled by the top 0.1%.... From the early 1980s... these trends have reversed.... The 16,000 families making up the richest 0.01%, with an average net worth of $371m, now control 11.2% of total wealth—-back to the 1916 share, which is the highest on record.... The top 0.1%... hold 22% of America’s wealth.... The outsize fortunes of the few would not be too worrying were they largely the product of entrepreneurial activity.... The club of young rich includes not only Mark Zuckerbergs... but also Paris Hiltons.... The share of labour income earned by the top 0.1% appears to have peaked... held in the form of shares... levelled off... held in bonds has risen... hint[ing] that America’s biggest fortunes may be starting to have less to do with building businesses...

The most interesting--and the most speculative--parts of Thomas Piketty's grand argument in Capital in the Twenty-First Century are, I think, implicit: underlying claims that:

Most wealth will be deployed, at least at the relevant margin, not in productive entrepreneurial or labor-complementary activities but in at best parasitic rent-seeking activities.

Democratic politics will not save us--that only exceptional circumstances in the twentieth century allowed for a democratic politics of progressive social insurance to level society and so promote social welfare in the face of the Gramscian hegemony of the bourgeoisie.

Both of these seem to me to be quite plausible, and perhaps true. But I think Piketty would have been very well-advised to Houston a lot more time backing them up in his book than he in fact did...

Noted for Your Lunchtime Procrastination for November 7, 2014

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

A Decent Monthly Establishment Employment Report This Morning: +214K Jobs: Daily Focus - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Evening Must-Read: Hal Varian: Big Data - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Afternoon Must-Read: Ben Bernanke: "Very Difficult" for ECB to Do QE - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Afternoon Must-Read: Matt O'Brien: The Latest Dumb Inflation Argument from a Billionaire - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
: Afternoon Must-Read: Hugo Panizza: Rashomon in Euroland - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Afternoon Must-Read: Kevin Drum: Are Central Banks Losing Their Credibility on Inflation? - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Plus:

Things to Read at Lunchtime on November 7, 2014 - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Must- and Shall-Reads:

Jeff Cox: Ben Bernanke: "Very Difficult" for ECB to Do QE
Matt O'Brien: Here’s the latest dumb argument from a billionaire that will hurt the economy
Ugo Panizza: Rashomon in Euro Land
Kevin Drum: Are Central Banks Losing Their Credibility on Inflation?
Hal Varian: Big Data
Paul Krugman: International Mensch Fund
Ricardo Hausman: The Tacit Knowledge Economy

And Over Here:

The Cost of Resistance to the ACA in Mississippi: Live from the Roasterie (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Hoisted from the Archives from Four Years Ago: What is Happening with Bond Prices? (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Over at Equitable Growth: A Decent Monthly Establishment Employment Report This Morning: +214K Jobs: Daily Focus (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Liveblogging World War II: November 7, 1944: Franklin D. Roosevelt: Remarks to the Torchlight Paraders on Election Night. Hyde Park, New York. (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

Jeff Cox: Ben Bernanke: "Very Difficult" for ECB to Do QE: "'The barriers to doing it are not really economic. The legal and political barriers being thrown up are going to make it very difficult to do that.' Bernanke also fired back at critics of the Fed's own easing programs, accusing them of 'bad economics' for saying that QE... would lead to inflation.... 'There never was any risk of inflation. The economy was in great slack. If anything we were worried about deflation. Four years later there's not a sign of inflation. The dollar is strengthening. They're saying, "Wait another five years, it's going to happen". It's not going to happen.'"

Matt O'Brien: Here’s the latest dumb argument from a billionaire that will hurt the economy: "Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.... Never underestimate the ingenuity of inflation truthers.... His latest investor letter recycles all these ideas, inveighing against the Fed's 'fake prices,' 'fake money,' and 'fake jobs,' before zeroing in on where inflation is really showing up--his wallet: 'Check out London, Manhattan, Aspen and East Hampton real estate prices, as well as high-end art prices, to see what the leading edge of hyperinflation could look like.' That's right: Paul Singer thinks Weimar-style inflation might be coming because he has to pay more for his posh vacation homes and art pieces.... The Fed, you see, isn't worried about the Billionaire Price Index. It's worried about inflation on goods and services we all face.... Just because the super-rich are bidding up the prices of houses in the Hamptons doesn't mean that middle-class people, whose wages are flat, are going to bid up the price of, well, anything.... If this is the best the inflation truthers can do, they should probably follow Mark Twain's advice and keep their mouths closed..."

Ugo Panizza: Rashomon in Euro Land: "Expansionary monetary policy is better than nothing, but a more stable euro zone requires expansionary fiscal policy now.... The problem is that northern countries do not want to implement expansionary fiscal policy.... Public debt is riskier in countries that cannot print their own currency... and the fiscally fragile periphery cannot implement expansionary policy without a backstop that can rule out debt runs. The only institution that can play this role is the European Central Bank.... If peripheral countries undershoot ECB's 'close, but below 2%' inflation target, somebody needs to overshoot it. If Germany wants peripheral countries to become more like Germany, Germans may need to become more like southern Europeans....The euro zone is flirting with deflation and yet there are members of the ECB board who oppose a more aggressive policy stance. It would be good to know what economic model they have in mind. Charles Wyplosz asked; Mr Weidmann did not answer."

Kevin Drum: Are Central Banks Losing Their Credibility on Inflation?: "We now have three major economies—the US, Japan, and Europe—which have persistently undershot their own inflation targets despite having enormous incentives to at least meet them as they try to recover from the Great Recession.... Everyone has assumed all along that if they were sufficiently motivated, central banks could always generate high inflation.... But what if it turns out that in practice it's all but impossible for a modern central bank to meet even a modest inflation target during a severe economic downturn? How do we know whether this is due to lack of will; lack of technical firepower; or lack of political support? And how long does it take before markets decide it doesn't much matter? After all, at some point there's no practical difference between unwillingness and inability.... The longer this goes on, the more their credibility gets shredded. It's a mystery why this isn't an issue of bigger concern."

Hal Varian: Big Data: "In this period of ‘big data,’ it seems strange to focus on sampling uncertainty, which tends to be small with large datasets, while completely ignoring model uncertainty, which may be quite large. One way to address this is to be explicit about examining how parameter estimates vary with respect to choices of control variables and instruments."

Paul Krugman: International Mensch Fund: "The IMF... concludes that it messed up by embracing fiscal austerity in 2010. It failed to understand that you need to differentiate between economies that borrow in someone else’s currency and those that don’t; it failed to appreciate that the negative effects of fiscal contraction would be much larger in a zero-lower-bound environment than historical patterns might suggest.... Let us nonetheless celebrate the IMF’s willingness to look honestly at its own record and learn from it.... Being a mensch... is all too rare in modern economic discourse, as the comedic evasions of the open-letter crew demonstrate. The Fund, it turns out, is better than that, and deserves praise."

Ricardo Hausman: The Tacit Knowledge Economy: "Brazil in 2010... better social indicators than the United Kingdom had in 1960.... Colombia, Tunisia, Turkey, and Indonesia in 2010 compare favorably to Japan, France, the Netherlands, and Italy, respectively, in 1960. Not only did these countries achieve better social indicators in these dimensions; they also could benefit from the technological innovations of the past half-century.... So today’s emerging-market economies should be richer than today’s advanced economies were back then, right? Wrong.... Why can’t today’s emerging markets replicate levels of productivity that were achieved in countries with worse social indicators and much older technologies?... To make stuff, you need to know how to make it, and this knowledge is, to a large extent, latent--not available in books, but stored in the brains of those who need to use it.... Human capital is knowledge that is hard to transfer. Information is knowledge that is easy to transfer."

Should Be Aware of:

Nadia Drake: How One Experimental Drug, ZMapp, May Be Defeating Ebola and Saving People

 

Jonathan Chait: Salon Writer Condemns Arithmetic As Racist: "Salon’s Jenny Kutner... refuses to concede... that Davis lost among women: 'The Tribune cited CNN exit polls to illustrate the landslide, saying Abbott "beat Davis... with... women (52-47).... Last time I checked, though, there were thousands upon thousands of women in Texas considered Latina and African-American... their votes were solidly in Davis’ favor: 94 percent of black women and 61 percent of Latinas voted for her. Only 32 percent of white women did. That’s certainly not enough women to say that Abbott won the whole gender....' It’s... not? My admittedly crude method of answering the question ‘Did Greg Abbott or Wendy Davis win the female vote’ would be to compare the number of women who voted for Abbott with the number of women who voted for Davis, and define the larger number as the winner. No way, says Kutner, citing Andrea Grimes.... 'You’ll hear that Greg Abbott "carried" women voters in Texas. Anyone who says that is also saying this: that Black women and Latinas are not "women"... that carrying white women is enough.... As if women of color are some separate entity, some mysterious other, some bizarre demographic of not-women.' Nobody is saying the votes of women of color don’t count. Everybody’s vote counts for one vote. I am comfortable stating that Barack Obama won the women’s vote in 2012, even though he lost white women. Kutner calls this method 'the erasure of votes from women of color'. Well, no. Being outvoted is not erasure. Until somebody develops a new, less racist way of comparing the value of two numbers, people are going to define the winner of a group as the candidate with more votes."

Scott Lemieux: Knowing That Pundits Don't Know What They're Talking About Is A Huge Strategic Advantage: "Most political coverage is premised on some potentially noble lies about how the public will punish politicians who subvert basic institutional norms or prevent popular things from being done. McConnell’s evil genius is to see that it’s all nonsense. The public generally doesn’t pay attention to the details of political squabbles. For all intents and purposes nobody in Congress pays a real price for obstructionism; even if the popularity of the party is dragged down it doesn’t affect the election chances of the vast majority of members. By the same token, Republican statehouses can refuse the Medicaid expansion and Obama will get more blame than the Republicans who turn it down, and so on. This cold strategic logic presents a serious problem because the structure of American government requires certain norms of comity to function in most circumstances — we’re about to get a lot of grim lessons about the superiority of parliamentary systems that don’t massively dilute and misallocate accountability--but this isn’t McConnell’s problem."

Kevin Drum: President Obama Can Safely Keep His Veto Pen in Mothballs: Ramesh Ponnuru is completely correct about this: 'A strange amnesia has settled over much of the political world. I can't count the number of articles I've read saying that the new Republican Congress is going to pass all sorts of legislation that President Barack Obama will veto. The latest example: George Will's syndicated column urging the Republicans to pass several bills even if it results in '"a blizzard of presidential vetoes".' There's no blizzard in the forecast. Senate Democrats will have the power to subject almost all legislation to filibuster (a word that does not appear in Will's column).'...I've noticed the same thing Ponnuru did, and it's weird. Is there some kind of unspoken assumption among pundits that Democrats aren't going to routinely insist on a 60-vote threshold for Republican legislation? If so, I don't know why. It seems pretty obvious to me that they will. At the very least, it allows them to keep most legislative negotiating leverage safely within the Senate, which is just where they want it. Basically, the next two years are going to be just like the last two. The only thing that will change is the order of the signatures on the consent agreements."

Jonathan Chait: Reading Is Fundamental, Charles C.W. Cooke!: "I would indeed be a hypocrite if I were now advocating that Democrats threaten a debt default or to refuse to staff a Republican administration. But I am not advocating this.... Cooke’s entire argument is sub-coherent.... He is calling me a hypocrite because one argument that he claims I made but didn’t contradicts another argument he claims I made but didn’t. National Review should withdraw Cooke’s column, donate his day’s pay to a foundation promoting adult literacy, and impose a probationary period in which he is restricted to the use of no more than one middle initial."

Hoisted from the Archives from Four Years Ago: What is Happening with Bond Prices?

What is Happening with Bond Prices?: August 18, 2010:

It is very hard to have a bubble in bonds because there is a date certain at which the principal is repaid. In year nine you cannot delude yourself into thinking that somebody will pay more than face value in year ten. And so in eight it is very hard to delude yourself into thinking that somebody in year nine will delude themselves into thinking that somebody will pay more than face value in year ten.

Nevertheless, Jeremy Siegel and Jeremy Schwartz think that we are in a bond bubble:

The Great American Bond Bubble: If 10-year interest rates, which are now 2.8%, rise to 4% as they did last spring, bondholders will suffer a capital loss more than three times the current yield. Ten years ago we experienced the biggest bubble in U.S. stock market history.... A similar bubble is expanding today that may have far more serious consequences for investors. It is in bonds, particularly U.S. Treasury bonds. Investors, disenchanted with the stock market, have been pouring money into bond funds, and Treasury bonds have been among their favorites.... We believe what is happening today is the flip side of what happened in 2000. Just as investors were too enthusiastic then about the growth prospects in the economy, many investors today are far too pessimistic....

From our perspective, the safest bet for investors looking for income and inflation protection may not be bonds... stocks, particularly stocks paying high dividends, may offer investors a more attractive income and inflation protection than bonds over the coming decade.... Today, the 10 largest dividend payers in the U.S. are AT&T, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Verizon Communications, Phillip Morris International, Pfizer, General Electric and Merck. They sport an average dividend yield of 4%, approximately three percentage points above the current yield on 10-year TIPS.... Their average price-earnings ratio, based on 2010 estimated earnings, is 11.7, versus 13 for the S&P 500 Index. Furthermore, their earnings this year (a year that hardly could be considered booming economically) are projected to cover their dividend by more than 2 to 1....

Those who are now crowding into bonds and bond funds are courting disaster.... If over the next year, 10-year interest rates, which are now 2.8%... rise to 4% as they did last spring, the capital loss will be more than three times the current yield. Is there any doubt that interest rates will rise over the next two decades as the baby boomers retire and the enormous government entitlement programs kick into gear? With future government finances so precarious, private asset accumulation and dividend income must become the major sources of retirement funding. At current interest rates, government bonds will not be the answer...

A bubble--I thought--is when those holding an asset do so because they expect its price to rise more-or-less indefinitely, and such a price rise is impossible. Such a bubble is very prone to rapid collapse when people realize that their expectations are very wrong.

Do holders of U.S. Treasury bonds expect the prices of the assets they own to rise more-or-less indefinitely? No, they do not. They expect their holdings of Treasury bonds to be and to continue to be safe places to park their money, and they expect other asset classes to be risky.

Over time, I think, the fear of other asset collapses will ebb--but this is highly likely to produce a gradual rise in the prices of other asset classes and a gradual fall in Treasury prices, but a gradual fall does not make Treasury bonds unsafe.

Those who hold Treasuries to maturity will get the returns they expect: for holders-to-maturity, Treasury bonds are indeed very safe absent a very unlikely upward leap in inflation.

So I cannot see any possibility of a bubble collapse at the short end of the Treasury market--less than ten years, seven.

But how about the spectrum from seven years on out to thirty? Could there be a sudden large downward movement in Treasury bond prices that would convince holders of Treasuries that they are not safe at all and induce a wave of panicked selling that would look like the collapse of a bubble?

In asset prices, never say never: the only thing you can ever say with absolute certainty is J.P. Morgan's: "they will fluctuate."

But I don't think so. People today buy an on-the-run ten-year Treasury at a yield of 2.64%--the bond with a 2.65% coupon maturing on August 15, 2020 at a price of 100.07. Its price drops tomorrow to 88.96. Do they conclude that their long Treasury position is too risky to hold? Or do they conclude that the Treasury correction has come and gone, and that Treasuries are actually safer than ever?

To argue that there is a Treasury bond bubble going on, you have to believe that such a fall in Treasury bond prices would induce further selling. And I cannot see that--not with the current state of macroeconomic news.